Skeddly Blog

We evaluated the new hourly usage pricing for WorkSpaces in this post. And while it may not be cost-effective for full “business-hours only” usage, there still are valid use cases for hourly billing.

The new hourly usage pricing does automatically stop your workspace after a pre-determined amount of inactivity. However having a short timeout may impede productivity due to it’s slower start-up and connection time. And having a large timeout will incur extra, unnecessary costs.

Until yesterday, Amazon WorkSpaces were charged on a monthly basis. This meant that when you created a workspace, you were automatically charged a pro-rated monthly fee assuming you would be running the workspace for the remainder of the month. At the start of all subsequent months, you were automatically charged the full monthly fee.

Yesterday, Amazon announced an hourly billing option to Amazon WorkSpaces. Depending on your usage style, your workspace could cost less than the monthly “always on” cost.

For those of you who don’t know, Amazon Web Services allows you to change the EC2 instance type of your EC2 instances. This means that you can change your existing t2.micro to an m4.large if you want. This change can be accomplished using the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or any of the AWS SDKs.

For many years, Skeddly has included the “Change EC2 Instance Type” action to automate this process. It’s a great way to lower your AWS costs, while keeping your EC2 instances available 24 hours a day. Many of our customers have had great success at lowering their AWS costs by changing the instance type of their EC2 instances at key times of the day or week.

Starting today, you are now able to reduce your AWS costs the same way but with an easier workflow.

Amazon WorkSpaces is Amazon’s managed desktop service. Using Amazon WorkSpaces, you can have a cloud-managed Windows desktop available using clients for Windows, Mac, Linux and tablets. We use WorkSpaces for our development environments.

Today, we have two new actions available to help manage your Amazon WorkSpaces workspaces:

Resource tagging is an important strategy for managing your AWS accounts. By adding tags to your AWS resources, you can:

identify resources more clearly,

document attributes such as cost, ownership, and teams,

group and select resources

Most DevOps strategies utilizing AWS use resource tags extensively. Tagging is so important these days that Amazon has added a dedicated Resource Tag Editor in the main AWS Management Console.

EBS volumes are a difficult resource to keep tagged. While they support tagging, EBS volumes are often secondary resources to EC2 instances. Because of this, they often are left untagged. Check out your own list of EBS volumes in the AWS Management Console. How many of them have any tags at all?

Often, there comes a day when you’ve come across a killer SaaS or product that will work with your AWS account.
It could be an automation tool (like Skeddly, a cost monitoring tool, a security tool, or
any one of the many other products designed to work with your AWS account. Whatever the case, in order to read or
modify information in your AWS account, you must provide credentials with which it will use to access your AWS account.

As a third-party vendor, we want you to be as safe with your AWS account as possible. So we’ve compiled some tips and
best-practices to put in place when working with third-parties that are going to access your AWS account.

Using this new action, you can apply a bucket policy to one or more of your Amazon S3 buckets. The policy can be one of our built-in policies, or it can be a custom policy of your own. AWS has supplied many example bucket policies. Some examples include:

Restricting access to specific IP addresses.

Enforcing encryption-at-rest on all object uploads - Recommended by many as a security best-practice.

Today, we’ve made available an updated version of our “Update Auto Scaling Group” action. The updated version functions identically to the old version except that it can update multiple groups at the same time. The new action is called “Update Auto Scaling Groups” (note the plural version of “Group”).